Sally Bushhouse, DVM, PhD
Director, Minnesota Cancer Surveillance System
Minnesota Department of Health
Wednesday, October 2, 2002
3:30 PM
Moos 5-125
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis East Bank Campus
Abstract:
High-quality, statewide cancer registries collect complete information on cancer
occurrences, including information on the address at diagnosis. The Minnesota
Cancer Surveillance System (MCSS), located within the Minnesota Department of
Health, is such a registry. The MCSS has complete, mappable data on an important
chronic disease with significant numbers of cases ... what a treasure for a
statistician! This seminar will address some of the practical issues to consider
before rushing in to do disease clustering or other GIS-based analyses of geocoded
cancer incidence data. We'll discuss data collection and data processing by
the MCSS as well as factors that affect geographic disease distributions. Finally,
we'll describe a specific investigation of cancer occurrence near one of the
nuclear power plants in Minnesota.